Pundit Quotes

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.

He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President's Bush right to vacation six days out of the week.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.

We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?

Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, "Why?

So I make no effort to hide my pain. I don’t ever put it all on display like this—but for today and all the rest of the days of the trial, I must. My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by the pundits and talking heads. But I’m told it’s necessary; the world needs to see me vulnerable and wounded. I cannot appear not to care or to lack remorse, but that removes a crucial component of my self- defense mechanism and leaves me bleeding for all the world to see. I suppose that’s rather the point.

Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS.

That idiot ‘pundit’ would rather believe you and Manny were thugs than believe a twenty-year veteran cop made a snap judgment based on skin color. He identifies with the cop. If the cop is capable of murder, it means he’s capable of the same. He can’t accept that.

When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

What the pundits call wishy-washiness, the Bible calls repentance.

The modern world is full of pundits, poseurs, and mall ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those come only with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist with a credit card can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an "M4gery" carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills and practicality.

Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

We plaster our news reports with political pundits not offering independent opinions but serving their masters.

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message.

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn't this happen every day?

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

And yet, if there was any question about how women in general fared on Planet Politics, one needed only to look at how Nancy Pelosi, the smart and hard-driving Speaker of the House of Representatives, was often depicted as a shrew or what Hillary Clinton was enduring as cable pundits and opinion writers hashed and rehashed each development in the campaign. Hillary’s gender was used against her relentlessly, drawing from all the worst stereotypes. She was called domineering, a nag, a bitch.

A child who goes to school and shares his or her lunch with the classmates, is a billion times greater and more religious than all the book-learned priests, imams, rabbis and pundits in the world combined.

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.

There is a moral sturdiness to (hardware store owner) Charley that isn't advertised or boasted about, but is obvious to all who know him and quickly discerned by those who don't. Our country has lately been afflicted with television preachers and pundits who focus on our families while neglecting theirs. How vainglorious these critics seem, how vacuous and shallow they appear when placed alongside a man of Charley's stature.

Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports

One pundit had asked her to visualize herself in the career she wanted while he chanted prayers to make her vision a reality. Her mind had gone blank, and this canvas of nothingness was the image sent up to the Gods.

To try to give our infatuation a higher place than Truth is a sign of inherent slavishness. Where our minds are free we find ourselves lost. Our moribund vitality must have for its rider either some fantasy, or someone in authority, or a sanction from the pundits, in order to make it move. So long as we are impervious to truth and have to be moved by some hypnotic stimulus, we must know that we lack the capacity for self- government. Whatever may be our condition, we shall either need some imaginary ghost or some actual medicine-man to terrorize over us.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

Nowadays, being “connected” means 24/7 availability. Emailing, texting, Twittering, calling, keeping one’s website and Facebook status current seem essential to being and remaining relevant in the world. In addition to the positive impact of globally interconnecting humanity, the information era is also contributing to the creation of a high-tech, low-touch society. It is impacting language, the publishing world, education, and social revolts. Neurologists and other pundits, including Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, point out the paradoxical downsides of not setting healthy boundaries or applying discipline to how we engage technology. Some have gone so far as to suggest that it is making us “spiritually stupid” by keeping us too distracted to participate in spiritual practices. But how about this: can using technology with mindfulness lead to beneficial social and spiritual connection?

When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support.

But after the September 11, 2001, attacks, terrorism became an obsession. Pundits and politicians turned up the rhetoric to eleven, and the word existential (generally modifying threat or crisis) had not seen as much use since the heyday of Sartre and Camus.

People like my parents, both veterans of World War II, came to be called the “Greatest Generation,” because they rose to the challenge and defended the world against tyranny. Often enough, certain pundits imply that no generation since—today’s generation, especially—can live up to the standard of the greatest generation. I could not disagree more. We face a challenge right now, you and I, that is even greater in aspect and scope than a global war. It is a battle for our house and home, and for our future on this planet. It is a moment for all of us to step up: through our personal effort, through the innovations we create, through the policies we support, through the people we vote for. You and I can be a part of the Next Great Generation. We can save Earth—for us. Let’s get to work.

You can see the proof in an MRI scan of someone presented with political opinions that conflict with her own. The brain scans of a person shown statements that oppose her political stance show that the highest areas of the cortex, the portions responsible for providing rational thought, get less blood until another statement is presented that confirms her beliefs. Your brain literally begins to shut down when you feel your ideology is threatened. Try it yourself. Watch a pundit you hate for fifteen minutes. Resist the urge to change the channel. Don’t complain to the person next to you. Don’t get online and rant. Try to let it go. You will find this is excruciatingly difficult.

In fact, just heading toward veganism lifts a not insignificant burden from the earth. According to food pundit Michael Pollan, who’s not a vegetarian, if everybody did even “Meatless Monday,” it would be the environmental equivalent of taking 20 million midsize cars off the road.

I had stopped believing in the perfect leader who could say 'Let there be justice' and by the force of his word change the whole earth into heaven. Instead I determined to grab hold of the truth I'd always known—that the Leader had already come, had chosen instead to say, 'My kingdom is not of this world,' and had been despised and rejected because His message was bigger than the first-century political pundits had predicted.

Our feelings provide meaning not only for our private lives, but also for social and political processes. When we want to know who should rule the country, what foreign policy to adopt and what economic steps to take, we don’t look for the answers in scriptures. Nor do we obey the commands of the Pope or the Council of Nobel Laureates. Rather, in most countries, we hold democratic elections and ask people what they think about the matter at hand. We believe that the voter knows best, and that the free choices of individual humans are the ultimate political authority. Yet how does the voter know what to choose? Theoretically at least, the voter is supposed to consult his or her innermost feelings, and follow their lead. It is not always easy. In order to get in touch with my feelings, I need to filter out the empty propaganda slogans, the endless lies of ruthless politicians, the distracting noise created by cunning spin doctors, and the learned opinions of hired pundits. I need to ignore all this racket, and attend only to my authentic inner voice. And then my authentic inner voice whispers in my ear ‘Vote Cameron’ or ‘Vote Modi’ or ‘Vote Clinton’ or whomever, and I put a cross against that name on the ballot paper – and that’s how we know who should rule the country.

And whether or not the educators who are trying to raise up America's students can actually set and meet higher academic standards, our cultural values make their job next to impossible. It's so much easier for pundits and politicians to point out figures and blame the people who are in the trenches every day than it is to get in there with them, or even to find out what actually goes on in those trenches. It's so much easier for parents to blame teachers when their kids get in trouble than to do the heavy lifting required at home to keep kids on track. And it's so much easier for us as a nation to cross our fingers and hope that we'll "get lucky" with the innovative "solutions" being tested on America's schools today than it is for us to roll up our sleeves and invest our own time, talent, and money in the schools that are even now-- with or without us-- shaping our nation's future.

If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it’s that being interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. “Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. Unfortunately, he’s wrong.

As much as the constitutionality of the state emphasizes the spreading of social and economic equality and scientific temper, it does not, however, explicitly talk about the unequal stakes inherited by the traditional power brokers. The reconciliation of the horrid past that manifests into the present remains unacknowledged. As a result, the question of reparation and inherited privilege does not feature in the discussions of dominant-caste people. This lack of historical accountability creates a group of self-declared nationalists, religionists, supremacists and merit holders that parade around as pundits proffering distorted versions of Indian society.

As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events.

Everyone acted like they knew so much about the war. But none of them really knew anything besides what they had learned through Internet searches or shady half-truths political pundits spouted from the comfort of their news desks. Nothing could ever be flushed out because nobody bothered to ask the troops or look at both sides of the story.

few would know that pundit is from Urdu;

Jackson?’ ‘Sir?’ ‘What’s a pundit?’ ‘I think it’s one of them Indian geezers, sir, as comes up and strangles you from behind.’ ‘Yes, that sounds very likely.

Blame Stalin, the pundits cry, echoing the argument made every time something bad happens in the former Soviet Union. Blame Stalin, because we can pronounce that name.

She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it. It

Priesthood, Imamhood, Pundithood often come hand in hand with tyranny.

And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts—although they may have valuable insights into the near future. The

Pundits these days keep jabbering and hooting about the Internet being the greatest advancement. Web this, web that, and let the resident spider suck the life out of you.

the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too.

I can't see why anybody — unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim — would even want to say a prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls — but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that — but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.

When pundits and strategists claim "attack ads work," they mean it in the most cynical of terms. As Ipsos Reid researcher Andrew Grenville told the Vancouver Sun: "Attacks ads can often work in the short term. They can give you a short boost. But they reduce the number of people who want to vote. They reduce participation in the democratic process. They poison the system.

Consumers of forecasting will stop being gulled by pundits with good stories and start asking pundits how their past predictions fared—and reject answers that consist of nothing but anecdotes and credentials.

Our prevailing philosophy is “you do you”—be who you were made to be, make your own decisions, and live your best life. We just want you to actually do you—not Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity—based on the experiences that you’re having every day and the values that you want to infuse into your life. And we want you to do you with your friends and neighbors and fellow parishioners and colleagues. Political pundits have become fond of discussing partisan politics as “tribal.” We don’t want your tribe to be your political party. We want it to be the communities in which you live, worship, and work—diverse in thought as they may be.

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact

For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have not.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

The question, from pundits and constituents, was obvious and loud: If you aren't transparent, what are you hiding? Though some citizens and commentators objected on grounds of privacy, asserting that government, at virtually every level, had always needed to do some things in private for the sake of security and efficiency, the momentum crushed all such arguments and the progression continued. If you weren't operating in the light of day, what were you doing in the shadows?

By the way he reacted, you would have thought I told him that slavery never happened. He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President Bush's right to vacation six days out of the week.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no “normal,” because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

The media and pundits of the day instructed women that their only true fulfillment could be found as wives and mothers, that sexist discrimination was actually good for them, that the denial of opportunity was, in reality, the manifestation of the highest possible goals of womanhood.

Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called for everyone’s attention. A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a tannoy “O people who wait in the shadow of Deep Thought!” he cried out. “Honored Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known, the Time of Waiting is over!

As I watched the US I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape—a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid—a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques—I knew the time had come.

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

If you're gay and politically aware, you see politicians sacrifice American ideals in general and gays' lives in particular on the altars of "tolerance" and "diversity". You see politicians and media pundits not only tolerating but embracing Islamic savages and their pedophile prophet. You see politicians put your right to life below a Muslim's right to escape from the countries they themselves created. You see politicians importing your own murderers. You see media pundits Balkanize the country into special interest groups to make it easy for politicians to divide and conquer - and you don't want to be conquered.

It wasn’t until the 2016 election that I knew the time had come. As I watched the US I thought I knew devolve, seemingly overnight, into an unrecognizable landscape—a place where political pundits threw up Nazi salutes in front of news cameras, unafraid—a place where swastikas bloomed like fetid flowers on the walls of synagogues and mosques—I knew the time had come. I called Jodi Warshaw, my first editor at Lake Union Publishing, and told her I’d finally found a World War II subject I wanted to write . . . and I wanted to write it now. Jodi agreed that the time was right for a story of resistance—of an ordinary person taking a stand against hate.

Maharajji invited a famous pundit to come to Kainchi and recite the Shrimad Bhagavatam. This man was used to reciting before large and very receptive crowds, and he complained to Maharajji that on this occasion he had to recite to only a few illiterate villagers. Maharajji gently rebuked him and said, “Don’t worry. Hanumanji is listening.

Howard Wynn did not suffer boredom or mediocrity well. He felt equally dismissive of willful ignorance—his description of the modern press—and smug stupidity, his bon mot for politicians. To his mind, they were a gang of vapid and arrogant thugs all, who greedily snatched their information from one another like disappearing crumbs as society spiraled merrily toward hell. With the current crop of pundits, bureaucrats, and hired guns in charge, America was destined to repeat the cycles of intellectual torpor that toppled Rome and Greece and Mali and the Incas and every empire that stumbled into short-lived, debauched existence. Show man ignoble work and easy sex, and there went civilization.

The forms rationalization can take are limited only by human creativity, and we are a very creative species.

The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.

In the United States, fascism is on the rise. Libraries are under attack. Some pundits ask why universities bother with departments that don’t just teach students to write computer code. Violent bigotry is fashionable again, and for many people, the appeal of politics is the opportunity to impose cruelty on others. The admonition to remember has never seemed so important.

failures like these have been fairly common in political prediction. A long-term study by Philip E. Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania found that when political scientists claimed that a political outcome had absolutely no chance of occurring, it nevertheless happened about 15 percent of the time. (The political scientists are probably better than television pundits, however.)

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed “to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience” with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of “sharing experiences,” people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes.” In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions. People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important. Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations; they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century too. Yet they cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

At every step of the way, to give her the contrast she needed, Thatcher marked out an opponent: the socialists, the wets, the Argentineans. These enemies helped to define her image as determined, powerful, self-sacrificing. Thatcher was not seduced by popularity, which is ephemeral and superficial. Pundits might obsess over popularity numbers, but in the mind of the voter—which, for a politician, is the field of battle—a dominating presence has more pull than does likability. Let some of the public hate you; you cannot please everyone. Your enemies, those you stand sharply against, will help you to forge a support base that will not desert you. Do not crowd into the center, where everyone else is; there is no room to fight in a crowd. Polarize people, drive some of them away, and create a space for battle. Everything in life conspires to push you into the center, and not just politically. The center is the realm of compromise. Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else. Instead see yourself as a fighter, an outsider surrounded by enemies. Constant battle will keep you strong and alert. It will help to define what you believe in, both for yourself and for others. Do not worry about antagonizing people; without antagonism there is no battle, and without battle, there is no chance of victory. Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared. Victory over your enemies will bring you a more lasting popularity.

Power and money in evil hands have caused all the miseries of the world so far. Both have devastated poorer countries in particular. There must be checks in the exercise of political and military power, and a ceiling on wealth (of all varieties). Governance in a situation of unequal hold on power and wealth is a sham. The pundits who write and lecture so much on governance should do well to learn this basic concept.

I’m happy that the GDP is up and unemployment is down. Yay! But I’m not drinking champagne. In fact, I’m hitting alarm buttons everywhere I can. Our once-solid middle class is in mortal danger—in danger and running out of time. Every one of those happy numbers is used by nearly every economic reporter and pundit and politician, but those numbers paper over the fact that America’s middle class is literally disappearing. NO

After each mass shooting, students, parents and neighbors call for common sense gun laws while pundits and legislators distract us with talk of mental illness and catchy phrases about people killing people, not guns. Relatively lost in the din of the well-practiced post-shooting punditry is a path forward: if we want to stop mass shootings - whether in schools or yoga studios - we have a stake in working together to stop violence against women.

The Great Rupture At the beginning of the twentieth century, globalization was viewed as so inevitable that some thought war itself was probably passé, and certainly so irrational that no right-thinking leader in Europe would ever take his country to war. In 1910, a leading British pundit, Norman Angell, wrote The Great Illusion, which rightly argued that national economies had become so interdependent, so much part of a global division of labor, that war among the economic leaders had become unimaginably destructive. War, Angell warned, would so undermine the network of international trade that no military venture by a European power against another could conceivably lead to economic benefits for the aggressor. He surmised that war itself would cease once the costs and benefits of war were more clearly understood. Angell tremendously underestimated the irrationalities and social processes that lead to devastating outcomes, even when they make no sense.

He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God.

So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what "good" or "bad" language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But no coherent criterion has ever been given: upon examination, the pronouncements of the self-appointed pundits are always a mix of cultural biases, half-understandings of languages, and an obvious compulsion for telling people what to do.

Many pundits, politicians and ordinary citizens believe that the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the Brexit mayhem and the instability of the European Union all result from a clash between ‘Western Civilisation’ and ‘Islamic Civilisation’. Western attempts to impose democracy and human rights on Muslim nations resulted in a violent Islamic backlash, and a wave of Muslim immigration coupled with Islamic terrorist attacks caused European voters to abandon multicultural dreams in favour of xenophobic local identities.

The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we’ve created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we’ve fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away

Most spiritual growth, most revelation, most answers to difficult questions require us to wrestle spiritually. There have always been and will always be charismatic men and women who can launch what sound like, on the surface, reasoned arguments against the Father and the Son, the Restoration, the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and living prophets. But doubters and pundits never tell the whole story, because they don't know the whole story—and typically don't want to know. They opt for clever sound bites, hoping no one digs deeper than they have.

The strategy we’ve adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as “the possibility of loss or injury.” —Warren Buffett, 19931

This is not more cultural happenstance. It is a blitzkrieg from the darkness—a frontal attack of calculated and evil dimensions plotted by the adversary of God, man and all that is good, and being advanced by cunning, demonic hordes who can only be blocked in one way: prayer. Call the people to pray. Teach them to counterattack. Unveil My Word to them so that, by calling on Me through the grace I readily give when they invoke the name of My Son, they may unleash My power. As they accept this partnership I call them to, praying that My Kingdom may enter the world of those they love “on earth,” I will answer them by My Spirit’s power—working My will “as it is in heaven.” Well, that is really what happened. I don’t mean, of course, that God stepped into my office in the sense of physical appearance. Rather He made His presence and will known by the means He has revealed in His eternal Word of truth—the Holy Bible. In that book, which is the ultimate authority on all life’s issues, both eternal and temporal, He says that He will speak at times to people by “prophecy.” In this use, prophecy is not a reference to anything arbitrary or arcane—God is never random; nor is He weird. (Toss out the pundits who publish cleverly

when evangelicals define themselves in terms of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ, what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no prisoners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things? How one answers these questions will determine what it looks like to follow Jesus. In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith. In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and “supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy categorization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

So if pundits were throwing up their hands even during the Eisenhower era about schools on the decline and students who could barely read and write, the obvious question is this: When exactly was that golden period distinguished by high standards? The answer, of course, is that it never existed. “The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured not the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits - Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump - dutifully filled this role. In their telling, 'Black Lives Matter' was not a call to end state violence against Blacks-and in that way, to end state violence against all-it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

Hard science ... is ultimately self-corrective, and wiser, in a way, than the scientists who pursue it; in the end it is apt to lead us to the truth, if only we have 'eyes to see'. But science itself cannot give us this vision: science as such cannot interpret its own findings; and neither, I would add, can modern philosophy. What is called for, I maintain, is a grounding in the traditional metaphysical doctrines of mankind: the very tenets that have been decried since the Enlightenment as primitive, pre-scientific, and puerile. Strange as it may seem to modern minds, these teachings ... derive ultimately 'from above': from the Center of the circle, if you will. Originally formulated in the language of myth, they have served as a catalyst of metaphysical vision down through the ages; neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Aquinas invented their own doctrines: all have drunk from this spring—except, of course, for the pundits of modernity, who have rejected that heritage. By now, to be sure, one knows very well to what destination modernity leads: we have, after all, entered the disillusioned and skeptical era of postmodernism. The argument against the traditional wisdom has now run its course, and the way to the perennial springs is open once more. The time is ripe for a new interpretation of scientific findings based upon pre-Cartesian principles; what is called for is a radical change of outlook, a veritable metanoia. Whether the doctrines of science will conduce to human enlightenment or to the blighting of our intellect hangs in the balance.

But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business, or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes. For pundits and politicians with a reputation for championing their faction, coming out on the wrong side of an issue would be career suicide. Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The

win. I thought the bureaucrats who had overseen the Emergency Rental Assistance program deserved a parade. They had to settle for scattered applause. When the ERA program was sputtering in the unsteady early days, it seemed that everyone was writing and tweeting about it. Later, when the rollout was working, it was ignored. Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program, ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it. So, the Emergency Rental Assistance program became a temporary program, and we returned to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.[31] Imagine if we had met the results of the ERA program with loud cheers. Imagine if we had taken to social media and gushed over what a difference it had made. Imagine if newspapers had run headlines that read, “Biden Administration Passes Most Important Eviction Prevention Measure in American History.” Imagine if we’d worked together to ensure that the low eviction regime established during the pandemic became the new normal. But we chose to shrug instead. Poor renters in the future will pay for this, as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a “messaging problem” when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair. Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it. When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

At times I have wished that the "experts" and media pundits who deny the existence of attention deficit disorder could meet ony a few of the severely affected adults who have sought my help. These men and women, in their thirties, forties and fifties, have never been able to maintain any sort of a long-term job or profession. They cannot easily enter meaningful, committed relationships, let alone stay in one. Some have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, some cannot even sit through a movie. Their moods fly back and forth from lethargy and dejection to agitation. The creative talents they have been blessed with have not been pursued. They are intensely frustrated at what they perceive as their failures. Their self-esteem is lost in some deep well. Most often they are firm in the conviction that their problems are the result of a basic, incorrigible flaw in their personalities.

The irony is that scientists are much less certain about what they say than politicians, policy makers, and pundits. The certainty of the kind you see in the face of a politician declaiming on tax increases or hear in the voice of a commentator condemning or endorsing a foreign policy decision, or the certainty you detect in the words of an op-ed writer pontificating on one thing or another—I used to think that they arrived at their certainty after considering an issue in great depth and finding that the evidence fell overwhelmingly in favor of a specific position. You must think me naïve ever to have thought this way. But I did. I used to think that a good argument was the midwife to certainty. If, as I now believe, it is the wish that fathers the thought, then certainty is the lingering imprint of a wish on thoughts and arguments, like DNA retained in progeny, acting invisibly but with visible effects.

Trump was hardly in office when Democrats and their media allies began tarring him and his top aides as “white nationalists.” There were no facts to support the charge, only innuendo, and tortured interpretations of the word “nationalism” and of presidential rhetoric. One of the worst examples was the Charlottesville, Virginia, historical monument controversy. In that city, leftist protesters demanded the removal of “Confederate” monuments and memorials. The term “Confederate” in their usage extended even to statues of Thomas Jefferson and explorers Lewis and Clark (for being “white colonists”). This sparked a protest by conservatives who objected to the statue removals—not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want to see the removal of these reminders of America’s history. A “Unite the Right” rally was planned for August 11–12, 2017, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, the rally attracted extremist groups, including neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. During the rally, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of leftist protestors, killing a woman. In response, Trump made a series of statements condemning the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and racism in general. In one of those speeches, he added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”115 Even though he had just condemned racism in his previous breath, many Democrats and pundits condemned Trump for calling racists “fine people.” This was not only absurd but dishonest. The “fine people on both sides” to whom he referred were those who wanted to remove the statues because they were reminders of slavery and those who wanted to preserve the statues because they were reminders of history. Trump never praised racists as “fine people”—he condemned them in no uncertain terms. But to the

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

Continetti concludes: "An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities. There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth." You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are. Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself. In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)